


what if we could

by thefudge



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV)
Genre: (because i don't know these kids), F/M, Grief Sex, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season 4, Probably ooc, Ugly/Abject, ost: trent reznor & atticus ross - what if we could
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24589159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefudge/pseuds/thefudge
Summary: She just doesn't want to feel like an empty body anymore. Drained of all feelings and sensations. A weird hybrid between an object and a person. A weeping fountain, all dried up. If she's going to mourn for the rest of her fucking life, she wants there to be something else to cling onto than her useless grief.  (jess/clay)
Relationships: Jessica Davis/Clay Jensen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	what if we could

**Author's Note:**

> i'm trash. i don't even go here, but i saw the gifset of them in church, mourning Justin, and i decided "it's free real estate".  
> this whole story might sound super OOC, because i really don't know anything about these kids, except what i got from wiki pages and youtube reviews. but i'm an absolute sucker for "grief sex" and just anything ugly and messy that comes out of the grieving process. so there's that. i'm sorry yall.

She just doesn't want to feel like an empty body anymore. Drained of all feelings and sensations. A weird hybrid between an object and a person. A weeping fountain, all dried up. 

If she's going to mourn for the rest of her fucking life, she wants there to be something else to cling onto than her useless grief. 

So she turns to Clay who is sitting hunched and weary at the foot of her bed. He's watching her with surly, almost adult concern because she collapsed at graduation. His own face has been rung dry of tears. He's mostly keeping strong for her. 

“Come up here. I need you to hold me,” she mumbles. 

And he obeys. Clay has always been good like that. She used to resent that about him, because it reminded her of her own younger, pliable self. But his weakness is not a weakness. She’s learned to love his kindness. 

He lies down next to her and watches her with the same unbridled concern. Like he’s afraid of the next thing she’ll do. Jess turns her back to him and takes his arm and locks it around her waist. Clay hesitates, then edges closer. Jessica sighs as he grips her to him, nose buried in her shoulder. 

They can smell the despair on each other. Jess wishes they could sleep like that, sleep for ages. But they lie together for what feels like hours and nothing seems to get better. They exchange body heat and they hear each other’s heartbeats and it doesn't bring Justin back. Not yet.

It's like they've been shipwrecked and there's no survival kit on the shore. 

He has to go, eventually. 

“I’ll come back in a few hours. I’ll bring some food. What do you want to eat?”

Jess shakes her head. “Nothing.”

But she does feel hungry. She feels like greedily consuming every memory of the boy she knew and loved. She feels like eating his clothes, stuffing each spool in her mouth, she feels like biting into the wood of the casket. Ripping off his eyelashes with her teeth. She wants to eat flesh. She wants to take Justin’s cock in her mouth and taste it one last time, and she shudders, disgusted and terrified at the thought. 

She lurches out of bed, her feet giving in, and runs into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

Clay panics. 

He knows how these things go. 

He slams his body against the bathroom door, asking her to please let him in, but she call out to him. Tells him she's sick.

He sits by the door and listens to her retch in the toilet. 

They're going to be okay. He has to believe that. 

  
  


She brings the spoon mechanically to her mouth, letting the hot Miso soup burn her throat. He's chewing on the spring rolls. They're quiet for a long time, just eating.

“We should go somewhere, get out of town for a while,” he says for something to say. They're all leaving for college soon anyway, but it's not soon enough. There's still weeks to go, weeks of dragging their bodies through grief like slowly sinking sand. 

Jessica puts the soup aside. She leans back against her pillow. “I want to go somewhere where he's alive.”

Clay swallows. “Me too. But we can't.”

“Do you think he's met up with Hannah by now?” she asks. 

It spooks him, the casual mention of her name. 

“Assuming there's an actual afterlife,” he says with a catch in his voice. 

“Justin can't be _completely_ gone.” Jess says it confidently, with an assurance that’s slipping further away every moment. 

“He's not,” he mumbles. “He's right here with us.” And he points to a vague spot between them on the bed. 

And for the first time in weeks she bursts into a short, hysterical laugh. 

“That's so fucking dumb.”

Clay nods, his body shaking with laughter, and other things. 

They sit there, cry-laughing, making the time pass without Justin. 

Eventually, they run out of air. 

They go quiet. 

“I should head home.”

Jess groans weakly. She doesn't want to be alone. She doesn't want to be _anything_. She just wants to forget for an hour or two. Her skin is sticky with summer heat. She pulls her T-shirt over her head. It's so easy to remove things that weigh you down. It’s harder to put them back. 

Clay blinks. 

“Jess -”

Before he can say anything else she takes off her tank top too and then her flesh is bare and Clay has to look away from her breasts.

Jessica cups them in her hands, feels how heavy they are, as if full with some fucked up grief milk.

“It’s just me,” she says softly. Clay’s shoulder line is rigid. 

He gets up and turns away. 

Jess shrugs out of her sweatpants. 

“Okay…you need to be alone,” he says hoarsely. “I'm gonna go.”

“Don't,” she says quickly. “Please don't leave me alone. I need you here. Turn around, Clay.”

His shoulder blades jut out like a question mark and his whole body has gone still. 

“You're...why?”

“I need you to see me like this.”

“ _Why_?”

“Because I can’t be like this with anyone anymore,” she says, voice cracking with something ugly and shameful. 

And Clay looks at her over his shoulder. 

Jess is naked and resplendent and her eyes are gouged out, like there’s an absence. And he knows what’s missing. 

She doesn’t look like anyone he knows. She looks like a stranger. That’s the thing about death. 

“Can you - can you please touch me?” she asks, hair falling over her nakedness. 

He touches her paper-thin ankle. He holds his fingers there like a little clasp. Her pulse is quick. 

Jess pushes her entire foot in his lap.

His trembling fingers slide up to her calf and under her knee. 

She watches him. He doesn’t look her in the eye. 

He leans down and kisses her knee. He kisses her thigh. Clay shudders, because she’s so warm. It’s like kissing an altar that no longer serves any kind of sacred purpose. Something untouchable has become touchable. 

He thinks, _this is enough, this is where we stop._

But she doesn’t have any patience for his hesitation. 

She turns on her stomach, knocking him off balance. 

She looks at him over her shoulder. “I need you to...just do it.”

Clay swallows. “Do what?”

“Take off my underwear. And then pull my hips up. And then be a fucking asshole.”

Clay hears the words, but they don’t process.

“I don’t - I’m not -"

"You're not what?"

"I don't want to be that kind of person.”

“Me neither,” she snaps. “But that’s what I need. I need you to be that person.”

His trembling hand settles on the small of her back. He feels betrayed by his own body, the way it responds, the way it doesn’t seem to care about him. 

He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

Fresh tears make her eyes brighter. “You can, you just won't. Because you hate me.”

Clay’s face falls. “I could never hate you. Fuck, Jess, I...”

“Then please…” and her crying turns to a sort of quiet, tremulous sobbing, chest heaving. “I just need you to fuck me. _Please_.”

Clay shudders again, feels himself pulse with her words, with the wanting of something near and bad. 

“Please fuck me,” she whispers, digging her nails into the sheets.

Clay closes his eyes. But he can’t see anything but her.

And he really wants to fuck her.

He hooks one finger in the band of her blue underwear and pulls it slowly down her legs, and it never seems to end, the wait for it all to unravel. 

It can’t be an out of body experience. They can’t pretend to be somewhere else and let the flesh do the work. Death makes you vigilant. 

Clay is hyper-aware of drawing her against him, lining his cock at her entrance, steadying his weight against her hips, sliding his fingers in that sweat-stained cleavage between belly and thighs. She’s so wet it makes him choke up, it makes him slip, it makes him have to keep her still. He can’t see what he’s doing because she’s turned off the lights, but everything is amplified, every touch is accidental and brings with it a guilty spark. 

“Please fuck me…” Jess chants hoarsely. “Fuck me blind... Fuck me till I can’t feel anything.”

Clay sinks into her with a terrified jolt. 

He stops, awed, stuttering. 

Jess moans, rolling her hips, telling him to sink deeper. 

“But…” he pants, “I won’t…”

_I won’t be able to crawl back out._

Still, he does what he’s told. 

It’s a relief, to sink to the hilt and then to move, to feel life coming back to him. In the dark, everything is moving with him. They’re not disparate, they feel together in a way that ignores identity. The steady stream of obscenities pours from her mouth like a hot shower, until she’s crying out, telling him to fuck her to death, to please fuck her so hard that her body fucking evaporates, and Clay groans like an alien thing and loses himself to a hectic rhythm, to the pleasure of not caring about anything. He holds her belly tight and then lowers his palm to her clit and lets her fuck herself against him too. 

She moans and gasps, “ _fuuuck_ , I wish you’d died instead of Justin.”

“Me too,” he breathes out harshly. “ _Me fucking too_.” He presses her body into the mattress. He makes it hurt. Didn’t think he had it in him. She says his name over and over and over again and he thinks how terrible to be named after something so easily manipulated. He gives her what she wants, because he wants it too.

They come messily, one after the other, numbed with pleasure. 

(as his cum slowly leaks down her thigh, she realizes with absolute clarity that Justin is never coming back. and she almost wishes she could make the cum go back inside her, unfuck herself to the moment where she still believed he might.)

  
  


They lie down in their sweat and come and stare at the ceiling. 

Her voice comes from very far away. “I didn't mean that about you…dying instead. I'd never want that.”

Clay sees her faint profile from the corner of his eye. “I know... but it’s okay to want to, sometimes.”

“No, it’s not. What I said, it was just…”

“Sex,” he says. 

She swallows. It has to be more than sex, but maybe that's the only thing there is, and the only thing they need. 

“I care about you a lot.”

“I care about you too,” he says, feeling strangely unmoored from his words. He cares more than he wants to admit. 

“So then why do I want to use your body?” she asks. 

Clay takes her hand in his. 

“I like being used. And I want to use your body too.”

It’s a strange declaration of callousness, but it feels vital in the moment. 

Hours later, she straddles him and he lets her sink around him and they go slower, more attentive. He’s hyper focused, wanting her to feel good, until Jess bends down and strokes his eyebrows and makes the tension go away. She kisses his forehead. 

“You feel so fucking good,” he stutters. 

“You too,” she mumbles, kissing his eyelids shut as his mouth latches onto her jawline. 

They hug tight, arms around each other, and they fuck slowly, forgetfully, filling each other completely and then come again against each other’s death-drunk mouths. 

In the morning, he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, like the first time. Hunched with worry. 

They’re dressed and sober and facing the reality of what they did and shouldn't have. 

There’s no going back, but no going forward either.

It’s just another morning. 

“We’ll never talk about it,” she says, sitting next to him, leaning her head on his shoulder.

Clay inhales her freshly showered scent. 

Maybe, underneath it all, they feel guilty about not feeling guilty enough and it feeds into a sick little loop of pleasure. 

It felt good, it felt really good for one night. 

He raises her head slightly and kisses her lips like a soft goodbye. 

Jess kisses him back. 

The ghost between them is no ghost at all.

He’s gone.


End file.
